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Representing the IdealAmerican Family:Avard Fairbanks andthe Transformation ofthe Western Pioneer Monument

CYNTHIA CULVER PRESCOTT

Cynthia Culver Prescott teaches in the Department of History at the University of NorthDakota.

Communities throughout the U.S. West erected monuments to white pioneer mothers in thelate 1920s. While other western sculptors’ interest in frontier women soon faded, AvardFairbanks continued to produce prominent public monuments to pioneer women andfamilies for the next fifty years. Fairbanks’s pioneer monuments provide a valuable casestudy for examining the ways in which changing social norms influenced public monu-ments over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing on Avard Fairbanks’s fifty years ofpioneer-themed monuments highlights the sculptor’s role in transforming idealized images ofsettler families from objects of purely regional memory into a national American family ideal.

Key words: Avard Fairbanks, pioneer mother, public monuments, historical memory,frontier myth, maternalism

In 1928, prominent sculptor Avard Fairbanks completeda life-sized bronze Pioneer Mother for the city of Vancouver, Washing-ton. Local residents eagerly awaited the unveiling of the statue, whichcommemorated U.S. women’s efforts to establish farms and commu-nities in lands inhabited by Indians and claimed by Great Britain.Fairbanks’s design, shown in Figure 1, would both honor those wo-men’s sacrifices on the frontier and instruct their granddaughters—this at a time when young women’s behavior seemed to threaten thecivilization that pioneer women had worked so hard to build.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, communities across the U.S.West looked to commemorate the sacrifices of white female settlersby erecting pioneer mother monuments. Then the movement faded.

The author thanks Michael Lansing for his guidance on this article.

Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, pages 110–142. ISSN 0030-8684, eISSN 1533-8584© 2016 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through theUniversity of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/phr.2016.85.1.110.110

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Though many Westerners lost interest in pioneer mother monu-ments, Fairbanks continued to create pioneer-themed monumentsthat simultaneously spoke to local cultural values and contemporarypolitical concerns.1 Over the course of his long career, Fairbanks

Figure 1. Avard Fairbanks, Pioneer Mother, bronze, Vancouver, Washington, 1928.Photograph by the author.

1. On the tension between depictions of pioneers in western monuments and therealities of white settlers’ lives, see Cynthia Culver Prescott, Gender and Generation on the FarWestern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007).

The Ideal American Family and Pioneer Monuments 111

recast his monuments’ stock pioneer characters to accommodatechanging national cultural norms and changes in American historicalmemory, while still speaking to local communities. Meanwhile, theirwestern identity was gradually subsumed by national creation mythscentered on the frontier.2 Over time, the white women, children, andmen in Fairbanks’s western pioneer statues transcended the frontierand came to represent the ideal American family. By the 1980s and1990s, his representations took on new life as conservatives advocatingso-called traditional family structures invested the statues with newpower.

The tenth son of Mormon farmer and artist John B. Fairbanks,Avard T. Fairbanks (1897–1987) studied under James Earl Fraser andother prominent sculptors in New York City and at the Ecole desBeaux-Arts in Paris. He was granted a Bachelor of Fine Arts from YaleUniversity and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study creativesculpture in Europe. Beginning in 1920, Fairbanks taught art at theUniversity of Oregon, the University of Michigan (where he wasawarded a Master of Arts and a Doctorate of Philosophy in anatomy),and other universities before being appointed dean and charged withorganizing a college of fine arts at the University of Utah in 1947.Throughout his long career, the sculptor created sacred art for theChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Fairbanks alsocreated many well-known secular sculptures, ranging from the fanci-ful La Primavera to several Abraham Lincoln monuments, and evena ram hood ornament for Dodge Motor Company. But he is bestknown for his pioneer-themed monuments for secular audiences.3

In the 1920s and early 1930s, communities throughout the U.S.West responded to anxieties about urbanization, immigration, andnew roles for women by erecting monuments to an iconic and imag-ined white pioneer mother. Interest in erecting pioneer mothermonuments faded in most western communities by the start of WorldWar II. But even as other western artists returned to perenniallypopular subjects such as cowboys and American Indian warriors,

2. On the frontier myth, see: Beverly J. Stoeltje, ‘‘Making the Frontier Myth: FolkloreProcess in a Modern Nation,’’ Western Folklore 46, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 235–54; Ted Amley,‘‘The Visual Politics of the Myth of the Frontier,’’ Midwest Review 14 (1992): 71–90; Ho-ward I. Kushner, ‘‘The Persistence of the ‘Frontier Thesis’ in America: Gender, Myth, andSelf-Destruction,’’ Canadian Review of American Studies 23 no. 1 (1992): 53–82.

3. Eugene F. Fairbanks, A Sculptor’s Testimony in Bronze and Stone: Sacred Sculpture ofAvard T. Fairbanks rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1994).

112 Pacific Historical Review

Fairbanks persisted in sculpting settler families into the late twentiethcentury. Particularly at times of widespread anxiety about rapidlychanging gender roles and race relations, mainstream audiences insome communities embraced the rural nostalgia embodied by Fair-banks’s stock pioneer characters—not only in the 1920s, but also inthe 1950s and the 1970s. Following Fairbanks’s death in 1987, otherwestern artists returned to pioneer family nostalgia amid the culturewars of the 1990s.

Because Fairbanks persisted in sculpting pioneer mothersthroughout his remarkably long and productive career, Fairbanks’spioneer monuments provide a valuable case study for examining theways in which changing social norms influenced public monumentsover the course of the twentieth century—and how those monu-ments, in turn, influenced cultural conventions. Yet little has beenpublished on Fairbanks’s monuments.4 Moreover, while scholars haveexamined the ways in which monument-building reflected contem-porary concerns about politics, race, and gender in various regionsand time periods, few have focused on how changing ideas about raceand gender have shaped monument designs over time.5 Focusing onFairbanks’s extraordinarily long and illustrious career therefore pro-vides a valuable lens through which to examine the influence ofchanging cultural conventions on the project of monument-making.

Furthermore, Fairbanks’s secular pioneer monuments reflectedand reinforced the dominant culture’s changing conceptions of theideal American family. As the historian Natasha Zeretsky argues,shared ideas about the family are ‘‘intrinsic to a sense of [American]

4. For more on Mormonism in Avard Fairbanks’s pioneer monuments, see: Prescott,‘‘The All-American Eternal Family: Sacred and Secular Values in Western Pioneer Monu-ments,’’ in We Are What We Remember: The American Past through Commemoration, eds. JeffreyMeriwether and Laura D’Amore (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012),334–58. Most of the only other studies of Fairbanks’s monuments were completed by thesculptor’s son, Eugene, and all tend more toward hagiography than critical analysis: EugeneF. Fairbanks, A Sculptor’s Testimony; Eugene F. Fairbanks, Abraham Lincoln Sculpture Created byAvard Fairbanks (Bellingham, Wash.: Fairbanks Arts and Books, 2002); Kent Ahrens, ‘‘AvardT. Fairbanks and the Winter Quarters Monument,’’ Nebraska Quarterly 95, no. 3 (Fall 2014):176–85.

5. Kirk Savage examined changing depictions of race relations within monuments tothe Old South erected in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kirk Savage, StandingSoldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1997). Existing studies of pioneer woman monuments havefocused almost exclusively on individual prominent monuments erected during the 1910sand 1920s.


national identity,’’ but ‘‘[d]uring periods of large-scale social transfor-mation’’ those ‘‘familial values [have] undergone revision.’’6 An earlytwentieth-century emphasis on maternal roles gradually gave way tocelebrations of the child-centered nuclear family. That nuclear familytook on new meaning amid cultural fragmentation beginning in the1970s. In the final years of his long career and after his death, Fair-banks’s stock pioneer mothers came to represent ideal Americanfamily life, tying his subjects into a rhetoric that was no longer specificto the West as a region.7 Focusing on Fairbanks’s fifty years of pioneer-themed monuments highlights the sculptor’s role in transformingidealized images of white settler families from objects of purelyregional memory into a national American family ideal.

The Pioneer Mother Movement

Statuary played a central role in celebrations of pioneering fromthe start. In 1883—thirty years after his arrival in Oregon Territoryand a mere twenty-four years after statehood—prominent settlerW. Lair Hill urged members of the Oregon Pioneer Association(OPA) ‘‘to gather up the scattered materials and erect a monumentto the pioneer mothers of Oregon.’’8 It took Oregonians another twodecades to erect such a statue—one of the earliest pioneer monu-ments erected in the U.S. West. Erected by the Portland Woman’sClub for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition Alice Coop-er’s 1905 bronze Sacajawea statue was celebrated by prominent suffra-gists as a tribute to that trailblazer and to the ‘‘pioneer mothers of oldOregon’’ who followed in her footsteps. But Anglo American men

6. Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of NationalDecline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of Chapel Hill Press, 2007), 4.

7. On changing conceptions of the American family in the twentieth century, see thefollowing: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the NostalgiaTrap (New York: Basic Books 1993); David Peterson del Mar, The American Family: FromObligation to Freedom (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011); Coontz, Marriage, a History:From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005). Onconservative visions of gender and the American family, see the following: Catherine E.Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the NewRight (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kirsten Marie Delegard,Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and GrassrootsConservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

8. Hon. W. Lair Hill, ‘‘Annual Address,’’ Transactions of the Eleventh Annual Reunion ofthe Oregon Pioneer Association for 1883 (Salem, Ore.: E.M. Waite, 1884), 21.


and women throughout the West soon came to challenge the ideathat an image of the famed Shoshone guide of the Lewis and ClarkExpedition could rightfully commemorate the sacrifices of white set-tlers. This female sculptor’s depiction of a Native woman—whosededicatory plaque claimed to simultaneously celebrate the accom-plishments of a specific Shoshone woman and a broader class of whitefemale settlers who migrated westward several decades later—soonyielded public attention to male sculptors’ celebrations of genericpioneer mothers as symbols of rural nostalgia, white domination, andsupposedly traditional gender roles.9

Organizations like the OPA sought to remember and celebratethe earliest white settlers in various western territories. The historianDavid Glassberg notes that ‘‘commemorative rituals—often celebrat-ing the origins of a community—have always been part of the Amer-ican scene,’’ and that in the nineteenth-century West, many historicalsocieties’ first activities ‘‘mark[ed] the anniversary of the arrival of thefirst ‘white’ settler.’’10 Groups like the OPA and California’s NativeSons of the Golden West offered commemorative rituals such aspioneer reunions and also sought to record their members’ accom-plishments for posterity.11

Celebrations of early white settlement collided with rapid socialchange in the early twentieth century, inspiring white Westerners toembrace a growing national trend of rural nostalgia that helpedAmericans to balance their pride in technological progress withanxiety over the social changes that progress inspired.12 Decliningavailability of homesteading lands coincided with rising anxietyabout dramatic shifts in American society. Urbanization, increasingimmigration from Asia and Southern Europe, falling birth ratesamong native-born white Americans, and the highest divorce ratein the world all convinced many that the American family was incrisis. These fears inspired efforts to shore up white civilization bypromoting more conservative domestic roles for white, native-born

9. Prescott, Gender and Generation.10. David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 61.11. Brenda Denise Frink, ‘‘Pioneers and Patriots: Race, Gender, and Historical

Memory in California, 1875–1915’’ (Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 2010); Prescott,Gender and Generation, 138–43; Malcolm J. Rohrbaugh, Days of Gold: The California GoldRush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 283–94.

12. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation ofAmerican Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).


women at the same time that native-born women and men tendedtoward nostalgia for an idyllic rural frontier past.13 Female progres-sive reformers sought to improve living conditions for poor immi-grant, indigenous, and rural mothers, and they viewed their ownstandards of modern ‘‘scientific motherhood’’ to be a route to Amer-icanization. But those standards were increasingly challenged bymore conservative women who hearkened back to the antebellum‘‘moral motherhood’’ ideology that had characterized mothers as the‘‘angel of the house.’’ These 1920s conservatives adapted nineteenth-century moral motherhood to encompass a patriotic, exclusionaryform of native-born white motherhood.14 Meanwhile, prominent mensuch as Theodore Roosevelt and the sociologist Edward Ross cele-brated the traditional (rural, white) American family, embracing a ra-cialized form of Jeffersonian agrarianism.15 Rurality—particularly thatembodied by white farmers’ wives in the midwestern ‘‘heartland’’ andrecently settled portions of the Far West—seemed to offer a crucialalternative to the dangers of modernity.16

While prominent Americans worried about race suicide andcelebrated rural families, conservative elements throughout theUnited States embraced public sculpture as a way to remember whathad been lost and to instruct future generations. Like monuments toCivil War soldiers and to supposedly vanishing American Indianserected in the late nineteenth century, twentieth-century memorials

13. John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘‘The Significance of theFrontier in American History’’ and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994);Louis S. Warren, ‘‘Cody’s Last Stand: Masculine Anxiety, the Custer Myth, and theFrontier of Domesticity in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,’’ Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1(Spring 2003): 49–69; Stoeltje, ‘‘Making the Frontier Myth’’; Kushner, ‘‘The Persistence ofthe ‘Frontier Thesis’ in America’’; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Trans-formation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1991, 1993); RebeccaJo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2010).

14. Plant, Mom. On maternalism in the United States, see also Seth Koven and SonyaMichel, ‘‘Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States inFrance, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,’’ American HistoricalReview 95, no. 4 (1990): 1076–108; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers andthe History of Welfare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

15. Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family inthe United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007);Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the UnitedStates, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

16. Janet Galligani Casey, A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal inAmerica (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).


to white men and women who settled the western United States weretypically funded through private donations and were designed bysculptors who had to gain public approval for their depictions.17

Whether erected in the Far West amid tributes to early settlers andfears over the declining availability of farmland, or in the Midwest,where—as historian John Bodnar argues—minority groups celebrat-ing their own cultural heroes competed with dominant AngloAmerican memories of earlier white settlers, monuments to earlywhite settlers consistently labeled those settlers as pioneers who hadcarved a path for others to follow.18 Communities erected these pio-neer monuments to meet their own perceived needs at a particularpoint in U.S. history. The monuments thus reflect those communi-ties’ ideals at the time that they were erected. Unlike Civil War andNative American statuary, little scholarly attention has been devotedto twentieth-century pioneer monuments.19

17. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves; Paul Scolari, ‘‘Indian Warriors andPioneer Mothers: American Identity and the Closing of the Frontier in Public Monu-ments, 1890–1930’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2005); Martha Norkunas,Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts (Washington:Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds.,Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press, 2003); Benjamin Hufbauer, Presidential Temples: HowMemorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005);Marianne Doezema and June Hargrove, The Public Monument and Its Audience (Cleveland:Kent State University Press, 1977); Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments inChanging Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Jeffrey Sanders, ‘‘Public Art,Memory, and Mobility in 1920s New Mexico,’’ in City Dreams, Country Schemes: Communityand Identity in the American West, eds. Kathleen Brosnan and Amy Scott (Reno: University ofNevada Press, 2011).

18. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism inthe Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

19. While several articles have focused on Cooper’s 1905 Sacajawea, less attention hasbeen given to the numerous prominent statues of the Pioneer Mother Movement. OnCooper’s Sacajawea, see: Patricia Vettel-Becker, ‘‘Sacagawea and Son: The Visual Construc-tion of America’s Maternal Feminine,’’ American Studies 50, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2009):27–50; Deborah M. Olsen, ‘‘Fair Connections: Women’s Separatism and the Lewis andClark Exposition of 1905,’’ Oregon Historical Quarterly 109, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 174–203;Gail H. Landsman, ‘‘The ‘Other’ as Political Symbol: Images of Indians in the WomanSuffrage Movement,’’ Ethnohistory 39, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 247–84; Jan Dawson, ‘‘Sacaga-wea: Pilot or Pioneer Mother?,’’ Pacific Northwest Quarterly 83, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 22–28;Lisa Blee, ‘‘Completing Lewis and Clark’s Westward March: Exhibiting a History of Empireat the 1905 Portland World’s Fair,’’ Oregon Historical Quarterly 106, no. 2 (Summer 2005):232–53. On other pioneer statues, see the following: Scolari, ‘‘Indian Warriors and Pio-neer Mothers’’; Annette Stott, ‘‘Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer Women: Images of Emi-grant Women in the Art of the Old West,’’ Prospects 21 (1996): 299–325; Frink, ‘‘SanFrancisco’s Pioneer Mother Monument: Maternalism, Racial Order, and the Politics of


While western states erected many statues to honor their ownfounding fathers, it was a generic pioneer mother who increasinglycaptured the American imagination during the interwar period.National organizations, local governments, and private donors allparticipated in a veritable Pioneer Mother Movement in the 1920sand 1930s. As American women gained new political, economic, andsocial opportunities—and concern with ‘‘new immigration’’ fromSouthern and Eastern Europe and from Asia grew widespread—monuments erected by conservative groups such as the Daughtersof the American Revolution (DAR) and western pioneer organiza-tions celebrated an earlier golden age of clearly defined genderroles and Anglo American dominance. In fact, the nativist DARembraced pioneer monuments as a means to simultaneously resistrapidly changing gender norms and to celebrate white civilization.The twelve identical August Leimbach statues erected by the DAR’sNational Old Trails Road Committee to mark major western trailscelebrated nineteenth-century gender roles along the nation’s newautomobile highways by embracing iconography typical of the Pio-neer Mother Movement (see Figure 2).20

At the height of the movement, prominent male American sculp-tors created a number of monuments to settler women; these monu-ments bore remarkable resemblance to one another. These iconicpioneer mothers were always white and usually young. Often sur-rounded by her children, but rarely accompanied by her husband, thepioneer mother symbolized the arrival of white settlement, advancedcivilization, and Anglo American gender norms to the savage frontier.

In her 1996 essay ‘‘Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer Women:Images of Emigrant Women in the Art of the Old West,’’ the arthistorian Annette Stott argued persuasively that changing gender

Memorialization, 1907–1915,’’ American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (March 2012): 85–113; Simp-son, ‘‘Pioneer Mother Monuments, 1914–1930: Images of Western Expansion,’’ Southeast-ern College Art Conference Review 13, no. 5 (2000): 435–43; Patricia J. Broder, ‘‘The PioneerWoman, Image in Bronze,’’ American Art Review 2, no. 5 (1975): 127–34; Greg Esser,‘‘Hazardous Trail to a Lasting Legacy,’’ Public Art Review 13, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2001):29–33; Rebecca Solnit, ‘‘The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence: Creating, Revising, andRecognizing Native American Monuments’’ in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes forPolitics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 40–50; Janet Galligani Casey, ‘‘TheAmerican Pioneer Woman circa 1930: Cultural Debates and the Role of Public Art,’’American Studies 51 no. 3/4: 85–107.

20. Carol Medlicott and Michael Heffernan, ‘‘‘Autograph of a Nation’: TheDaughters of the American Revolution and the National Old Trails Road, 1910–1927,’’National Identities 6, no. 3 (2004): 233–60; Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki.


Figure 2. August Leimbach, Madonna of the Trail, crushed granite, stone, marble,cement and lead, Springfield, Ohio, 1928. Photograph by the author.


norms from the 1890s to the 1920s led to stronger, more active rolesfor women in western art during that period than had been typicalduring the mid-nineteenth century.21 Yet an examination of themany statues erected in the late 1920s and the 1930s reveals thatthese changes appeared less frequently in public monuments in-tended to memorialize the sacrifices of donors’ ancestors than theydid in other works of western art. And although pioneer mothermonuments occasionally defied nostalgic domestic imagery, theystill represented a golden past to individuals discomfited by signifi-cant changes in women’s social roles during the 1920s. Intenselydomestic images continued to define pioneer monuments long afterstronger women’s roles emerged in the 1920s—in no small partbecause of the sculptor Avard Fairbanks, who continued to landcommissions across the West.22

Pioneer mothers and fathers

In July 1929, prominent citizens gathered across the ColumbiaRiver from Portland, Oregon, to dedicate Fairbanks’s bronze memo-rial ‘‘typifying ‘the pioneer mothers.’’’23 Rather than depicting anyparticular nineteenth-century woman, Fairbanks intended the stat-uary group erected in Vancouver, Washington, to be ‘‘an idealiza-tion of all the pioneer mothers who came to the perilous newwestern country side-by-side with the pioneer fathers.’’24 In hisdesign, shown above in Figure 1, Fairbanks played to white PacificNorthwest residents’ determination to believe—however inaccu-rately—that their ancestors had maintained distinct gender sphereswhile traveling West on the Oregon Trail. In fact, he depicteda domestic ideal that had been closely held by westering men andwomen in the 1840s and 1850s (and the many eastern artists whoembraced Prairie Madonna imagery in that era) but that their chil-dren in late nineteenth-century Oregon and Washington had

21. Stott, ‘‘Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer Women.’’22. See, for example, Leo Friedlander, Pioneer Woman, marble, Denton, Texas, 1938;

Merrell Gage, Pioneer Women of Kansas, bronze, Topeka, Kansas, 1937; Cyrus E. Dallin,Pioneer Mother, bronze, Springville, Utah, 1932; Ellis Luis Burman, The Pioneer Woman,concrete, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1935.

23. ‘‘Vancouver Unveils Fountain Memorial,’’ The Morning Oregonian, date unknown,in Avard T. Fairbanks vertical file, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland,Oregon.

24. Ibid.


abandoned.25 Vancouver’s civic leaders approved of Fairbanks’s ide-alized image. At the statue’s unveiling ceremony, Judge W. W.McCredie ‘‘suggested that all mothers were well typified by thestatue,’’ including primary donor Ida Crawford, who, though child-less, ‘‘displayed the qualities of the [white] pioneer mothers in herloyal and tender care of her husband.’’26

In the Vancouver monument, Fairbanks balanced nostalgia forseparate gender spheres with more modern, active forms of moth-erhood. He sculpted a larger-than-life woman surrounded by threeyoung children, with her left hand resting tenderly on the head ofher eldest child, a daughter. This daughter, in turn, reassures theyoungest child, while a son grasps their mother’s skirts. Interestingly,Fairbanks’s 1928 pioneer mother strays from some of the iconogra-phy typical of other artists’ work. Although she is armed with a rifle,she does not trample cactus or march westward. Instead, Fairbanks’sPioneer Mother rests demurely against a shoulder-high concrete back-drop whose shape evokes domestic features. The ruffled neckline ofher flowing gown emphasizes her femininity and suggests modernclothing styles. Meanwhile, the shawl on her shoulders gently echoesthe Madonna-like headscarves typical of western art produced at theheight of the cult of domesticity nearly a century earlier, rather thanthe sturdy sunbonnet designed to protect and contain white woman-hood in the western wilderness.27 The statue’s original settingof a waterfall and flowering shrubs further softened the scene.28

While she has a son at her side, he is balanced by an older, nurturing

25. Prescott, Gender and Generation; Prescott, ‘‘Crazy Quilts and Controlled Lives:Consumer Culture and the Meaning of Women’s Work in the American Far West’’ inWomen and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950, eds. Maureen DalyGoggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate 2009), 111–27.

26. ‘‘Vancouver Unveils Fountain Memorial.’’27. On Marian imagery in western art, see Stott, ‘‘Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer

Women.’’ On the cult of domesticity, see Jane H. Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls:The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University Press 2002); NancyF. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘‘Woman’s Sphere’’ in New England, 1780–1835 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family inOneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Bar-bara Welter, ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,’’ American Quarterly 18 (1966):151–74.

28. ‘‘Vancouver Unveils Fountain Memorial’’; Photograph of Avard Fairbanks, ‘‘ThePioneer Mother Memorial,’’ Inventory of American Sculpture Control Number 77003022,Smithsonian Institution Research Information System, accessed July 9, 2011, http://siris-artinventories.si.edu.


daughter on her other side. Overall, Fairbanks’s maternal groupinghearkened back to mid-nineteenth-century domestic ideology. YetFairbanks’s domestic scene was nestled within a park dedicated tothe memory of Esther Short, who, according to the Morning Orego-nian, was ‘‘a pioneer mother who not only defended her home andchildren against the Indians but also against encroachments of theHudson Bay company.’’29 Like Short, the idealized mother graspsa rifle with which to defend her young children; however, sheappears unprepared to use it. This demure pioneer mother evokedconservative 1920s moral motherhood ideology, which emphasizedmaternal sacrifice and viewed motherhood as the basis of femalecitizenship.30

Fairbanks’s Pioneer Mother celebrated an idealized image of mid-nineteenth-century domesticity while simultaneously honoring theheroism of women’s contributions to tasks outside that domesticsphere—a precarious balance struck in varying ways by many Pio-neer Mother Movement statues. In his Vancouver statue, Fairbanksbalanced women’s domesticity and heroism by mirroring the ten-sion between celebratory notes struck in pioneer tributes and earlysettlers’ published reminiscences and the realities of settlers’ lives.31

The sculpture’s gentle domesticity was reinforced by a medal-lion affixed to its back: a recasting of Fairbanks’s earlier Old OregonTrail bas relief, which depicts a hardy pioneer guiding his coveredwagon and ox team over rough western terrain, while his bare-headed wife holds their baby in a Madonna-like pose, the arc of thewagon cover forming a halo encircling her head (see Figure 3). Fair-banks’s 1924 Old Oregon Trail medallion echoed both the insignia of

29. ‘‘Vancouver Unveils Fountain Memorial.’’30. While historians have generally assumed that the antebellum ideal of ‘‘moral

motherhood’’ was replaced by the rise of ‘‘scientific motherhood’’ during the 1920s,Rebecca Jo Plant argues convincingly that traditionalists continued to view ‘‘Americanmotherhood’’ as a national social and political institution throughout the interwar period.Plant, Mom, 55–85.

31. At least one daughter of Oregon settlers disagreed with this imagery. IzellaSurfus Osterud viewed the Fairbanks monument in the late 1960s. ‘‘‘T’wasn’t like that atall. Not at all,’’’ she informed her granddaughter, Grey Osterud. ‘‘‘First thing is, the babywould be dead . . . The danger wasn’t wildcats or Indians, but cholera,’’ she replied,speaking as much to the statue as to [Osterud]. ‘Guns weren’t any use for that. Anda mother couldn’t protect her children, either.’ She concluded, ‘Should have waiteda couple of years and taken the train.’’’ Author correspondence with Grey Osterud, 20October 2009. On the tension between pioneer memory and frontier reality, see Prescott,Gender and Generation.


the DAR’s National Old Trails Road Committee and W. H. D. Koer-ner’s famous 1921 Madonna of the Prairie painting. For the purpose ofthe Vancouver monument, Fairbanks adapted his earlier designslightly, renaming it The Pioneer Mothers, and thus redefining it asa tribute to rural women’s nurturing role and devotion to the domes-tic sphere, even in the roughest western conditions.32

A series of bronze bas reliefs that Fairbanks created in the late1920s for the front doors to the U.S. National Bank building innearby Portland, Oregon, paired a similar covered-wagon Madonnawith more modern roles for women. One panel repeated the imag-ery of the Old Oregon Trail and The Pioneer Mothers medallions, with

Figure 3. Avard Fairbanks, The Pioneer Mothers, bronze, Vancouver, Washington,1928. Photograph by the author.

32. Avard T. Fairbanks, Pioneer Mother, bronze, Vancouver, Washington, 1928; AvardT. Fairbanks, The Pioneer Mothers, bronze, Vancouver, Washington, 1928; Avard T. Fair-banks, Old Oregon Trail, bronze, Baker City, Oregon, 1924. On Madonna of the Prairieimagery, see Stott, ‘‘Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer Women.’’


a bare-headed Anglo American woman riding in a covered wagonalong a rock-strewn Oregon Trail, guided by her brave pioneerhusband. Another panel depicted established white settlement:a young mother stands—tall and proud and dressed in fashionablelate nineteenth-century attire—holding her young son by the handas they admire Oregon’s first steamboat. Meanwhile, her farmerhusband plants an orchard on the river bank. Taken together, thesepanels represent progress and the coming of white civilization toOregon—civilization that was personified in Fairbanks’s iconic whitepioneer mother. This gentle, nurturing mother reappeared regu-larly in pioneer monuments created by Fairbanks over the next fiftyyears. However, her role within an idealized pioneer family shiftedin the 1930s, reflecting changes in American family ideals.33

During the Great Depression, monuments to pioneer womenproduced by other artists such as Leo Friedlander and Cyrus Dallinoften depicted white women alone, unaccompanied even by theirchildren. As the economic downturn challenged both women’s new-found independence and men’s breadwinner identity, prominentsculptors stepped back from the strong female imagery of sunbon-neted women striding westward that had been popular among manyartists in the late 1920s.34 Monuments erected on statehouse groundsin Oregon and Kansas deployed images reminiscent of Fairbanks’smore domestic Vancouver Pioneer Mother.35 Moreover, as many Amer-icans struggled to feed their families, sculptors generally abandonedmaternal imagery in pioneer monuments in favor of solo, apparentlyvirginal young white women.36 As other artists embraced the gentlerimages Fairbanks favored (but without children), Fairbanks—whowas Mormon—shifted his focus to Mormon pioneer families. Whileboth Mormons and non-Mormons placed pioneer women on a ped-estal, the pioneer-themed sculptures that Fairbanks produced for theLDS Church emphasized the centrality of family units in the Utahmigration.

33. Avard T. Fairbanks, United States National Bank Doors, bronze, Portland, Oregon,1926–1931; ‘‘Sculptor’s New Achievement,’’ Salt Lake Tribune Oct. 18, 1931, 7.

34. Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2d ed. (New York:Oxford University Press, 2006).

35. Friedlander, The Covered Wagon, marble, Oregon Statehouse, Salem, Oregon,circa 1937; Gabriel Lavare, Pioneer Mother, marble, Oregon State Library, Salem, Oregon,circa 1939; Gage, Pioneer Women of Kansas.

36. See for example: Dallin, Pioneer Mother; Burman, The Pioneer Woman; Friedlander,Pioneer Woman; [Pioneer Woman], Mount Hope Cemetery, Ellis, Kansas, 1933.


At the height of the Depression, amid nationwide calls for mento become involved fathers, Fairbanks sculpted a pair of Mormonfamilies for the LDS Church’s display at the 1934 Chicago World’sFair: A Tragedy at Winter Quarters and Youth and New Frontiers.37 Thesemonuments were later cast in bronze for important LDS sites.38

A Tragedy at Winter Quarters, shown in Figure 4, depicts the artist’sancestors burying their baby. More broadly, this statue of a westeringwhite mother and father side-by-side, unified by their grief as theystand over their infant’s open grave, commemorates the suffering ofMormon families both at Winter Quarters in Nebraska and on thejourney west to Utah. This Mormon pioneer mother faces tragedyunimagined in Fairbanks’s earlier, secular works. In the postwarperiod, the pioneer mother would gradually yield her place at thecenter of the family to her husband and children. For now, however,Fairbanks’s LDS couple stands united in mourning the loss of theirbeloved child, and the sturdy pioneer patriarch embraces his youngwife, protecting her with his strong arm and swirling overcoat.39

37. Scholars such as Peter Filene, Steven Mintz, and Susan Kellogg have argued thattheir inability to support their families during Great Depression caused men to withdrawfrom parenting. However, Ralph LaRossa demonstrated that the popular parenting lit-erature of the 1930s actually encouraged men to take a more active role in raising theirchildren, compared to an emphasis on ‘‘the father as pal’’ to older boys in the 1920s. PeterFilene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2d ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni-versity Press, 1986); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History ofAmerican Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988); Ralph LaRossa, The Modernization ofFatherhood: A Social and Political History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

38. Westward migration was a central part of the Mormon experience in the mid-nineteenth century, as church members migrated to Utah. Because early church leadersbelieved that God had called them to settle and establish their church in Utah, theMormon migration to Utah represented a sacred calling and a central event in churchhistory. In the twentieth century the church commissioned art depicting that westwardmigration. Fairbanks’s A Tragedy at Winter Quarters was soon cast in bronze and erected inOmaha, Nebraska, 1936. In1948, the First Presidency cancelled their order for Youth andNew Frontiers (also known as the Mormon Pioneer Family). The piece was installed decadeslater as New Frontiers in the new LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City. Avard T.Fairbanks, A Tragedy at Winter Quarters, bronze, Omaha, Nebraska, 1936; Avard T. Fair-banks, New Frontiers, bronze, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1934; Agreement between the FirstPresidency and Avard Fairbanks, 1948, Folder 5, Box 1, L, Avard T. Fairbanks Papers(1906–1987), MSS 5866, Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BrighamYoung University, Provo, Utah [hereafter Fairbanks Papers, Lee Library]; First Presidencyto Avard Fairbanks, 19 October 1948, Folder 5, Box 1, L, Fairbanks Papers, Lee Library.

39. While this work was displayed in clay at the 1934 world’s fair, it was soon cast inbronze and erected as part of the Winter Quarters Cemetery Monument in Florence,Nebraska. Avard T. Fairbanks, A Tragedy at Winter Quarters; Eugene F. Fairbanks, A Sculptor’sTestimony, 80–95; Jonathan Fairbanks, ‘‘Eternal Celebrations in American Memorials,’’ in


Figure 4. Avard Fairbanks, A Tragedy at Winter Quarters, bronze, Omaha,Nebraska, 1936. Photograph by David M. Prescott.

‘‘Remove not the Ancient Landmark’’: Public Monuments and Moral Values: Discourses and Com-ments in Tribute to Rudolf Wittkower, ed. Donald Martin Reynolds (New York: Gordon andBreach, 1996), 182.


Youth and New Frontiers offered hope to counterbalance thegrief of A Tragedy at Winter Quarters. As shown in Figure 5, it depicteda young patriarchal family full of life and health. Fairbanks ex-plained that the ‘‘man is placed characteristically as the foremostfigure,’’ while the ‘‘mother is placed as the central figure and is upona pedestal, an evidence of the high esteem in which Latter-day Saintshold womankind and especially mothers.’’ While Fairbanks describedthe woman as the ‘‘central figure’’ and placed her at the physicalcenter of the monument, he referred to her by her familial role—whereas he referred to her husband as simply a ‘‘man,’’ independentof his familial role. That man, their son, and even the baby appearnearer to the viewer, upstaging the woman’s central location andplacement on a pedestal that Fairbanks intended to symbolize Mor-mons’ respect for mothers. Far more than the sainted pioneermother, or even the son whose seeking of ‘‘new frontiers’’ gives thestatue its name, it is the father—as the foremost figure and the one inthe most active pose—who draws the viewer’s attention and thusbecomes the central character in this work. He provides (as evi-denced by the grain in his right hand), and he supports his family(symbolized by his left arm supporting—but not cradling—the baby).Whereas other sculptors placed a Bible in a pioneer woman’s hand,symbolizing her role of bringing Christian civilization to supposedlysavage western lands, it is the father and patriarch who provides bothmaterial support and spiritual guidance for Fairbanks’s Mormon fam-ily. While LDS men and women might stand united in the face oftragedy, Fairbanks sought to emphasize fathers’ patriarchal leader-ship. Abandoning the celebration of moral motherhood that hadresonated with the descendants of Oregon Territory settlers in his1928 Vancouver Pioneer Mother, Fairbanks emphasized the centrality ofmen as leaders of the family unit in this pair of sculptures created forthe LDS Church.40

This Mormon focus on the male-headed family unit recurredthroughout Fairbanks’s later sacred art. For example, in a 1942 BellTower plaque created for Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah,a pioneer father holds a young baby while his wife gazes lovingly at

40. ‘‘New Pioneer Monument Planned for Salt Lake,’’ unidentified clipping, Folder6, Box 4, Avard T. Fairbanks Papers, Accession No. 1336, Special Collections, J. WillardMarriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah [hereafter Fairbanks Papers,Marriott Library]; ‘‘Temple Block Monument Nears Completion: Work to Be UnveiledPioneer Day,’’ The Deseret News February 20, 1937. Emphasis added.


Figure 5. Avard Fairbanks, New Frontiers, bronze, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1937.Photograph by the author.


the infant, her opposite arm embracing their young son.41 A descrip-tion of this Pioneering bas relief in the LDS Relief Society Magazineexplained that the family group—consisting of ‘‘a stalwart father,a tender mother, an infant child, a sturdy boy—typifies the Mormonfamily as it ventured forth into the unknown West.’’42 While Fair-banks moved the father to the rear of the family grouping in thiswork, the patriarch’s more active pose and greater dimensionalitystill draw the viewer’s attention to his dominant role in the family.Although the father in Youth and New Frontiers holds their infant, itsbody is nestled closer to its mother than to its father. In Pioneering,both parents gaze at the infant, which is clearly cradled by thefather. While the mother’s arm encircles her son and gently holdshis hand, her gaze remains trained on the baby—who would returnto her arms in future Fairbanks family sculptures. As Fairbanks grad-ually moved the mother and baby to the background, he made thefather more central in both sacred and secular pioneer monuments.

Pioneer families

Just as growing roles for women and immigrants followingWorld War I inspired xenophobia and nostalgia for an imaginedagrarian past, economic and baby booms following World War IIinspired an idealization of the white, native-born nuclear family.That family form featured the husband as patriarch and breadwin-ner, wife as nurturing mother, and several young children at home.By the 1950s, many Americans viewed children as the center of theAmerican family. Advice books and popular magazines taught thatfamily life should revolve around the needs of young children.43

A woman was expected to find fulfillment in her role as wife andmother and—in the words of the historian Stephanie Coontz—was‘‘pitied if she did not want what was expected of her.’’44 Scholars such

41. Avard T. Fairbanks, Pioneering (Bell Tower Plaques), bronze, Salt Lake City, Utah,1942.

42. ‘‘Pioneering,’’ Relief Society Magazine, September 1942, 1.43. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New

York: Basic Books, 1988); Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female in the MassMedia (New York: Times Books, 1994); Coontz, The Way We Never Were ; Viviana A. Zelizer,Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1994); Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap Press, 2004).

44. However, Stephanie Coontz made clear, this ideology was not embraced by allwomen, particularly working-class women and women of color. Coontz, A Strange Stirring:


as Joanne Meyerowitz, Jessica Weiss, and others have demonstratedthat many families—both white and non-white—failed to fit the pre-scribed pattern of a male breadwinner, female homemaker, andthree or more young children, all united in family ‘‘togetherness.’’45

Nonetheless, many Americans—particularly those in the growingmiddle class—accepted the new glorification of the white nuclearfamily so prevalent in the mass media and aspired to live it out.

This emphasis on the nuclear family unit can be seen in pio-neer monuments created by Fairbanks throughout the postwarperiod. Immediately following World War II, as other sculptors andmonument donors largely abandoned pioneer mothers, Fairbanksexplicitly embraced the Madonna-like imagery that he had previouslyused only in bas relief panels. For the first time, Fairbanks placeda babe in its mother’s arms. Rather than utilizing the relatively strongimagery of solo women holding babies that had been typical of othersculptors’ works in the 1920s and 1930s, however, Fairbanks returnedto the Madonna imagery typical of mid-nineteenth-century westernpaintings and adapted it to new social conditions. Far from a celebra-tion of women’s independence, the 1946 Pioneer Family Group, whichwas erected on the lawn of North Dakota’s new art deco capitol,incorporated new postwar ideas about the importance of the nuclearfamily and suburban domestic life even as it evoked nineteenth-century domestic ideology (see Figure 6).46 In this work, the baby thatFairbanks placed in its mother’s arms served to identify her unequiv-ocally as a nurturing mother and drew her attention aside to domesticmatters, while her husband stepped into a clear leadership role. AsFairbanks explained to the governor of Idaho:

My desire in this monument was to express the family as a unit with theindividual characteristics of each. The feminine qualities in the figure ofthe mother of tenderness and love, strength and dependability in the fatherand the suggestion of adventure in the adolescent youth who holds to his

The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books,2011), 75.

45. Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America,1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Meyerowitz, ‘‘Beyond theFeminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture,’’ Journal of American History79 (1993): 1455–83; Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and SocialChange (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

46. Avard T. Fairbanks, Pioneer Family Group, bronze, Bismarck, North Dakota, 1946.


father for guidance are universal ideals and the latter expresses the fatherand son relationship particularly.47

Thus Fairbanks sought to include such typical white characters asa strong, hardworking man and a gentle, loving mother that were

Figure 6. Avard Fairbanks, Pioneer Family Group, bronze, Bismarck, North Dakota,1946. Photograph by the author.

47. Avard Fairbanks to Governor C. A. Robbins, 3 September 1948, Folder 2, Box 11,Fairbanks Papers, Marriott Library.


characteristic of his pioneer monuments of the 1920s in this postwarmonument.48 He also sought to represent idealized white family lifeas it was (re)defined in the immediate postwar era: family together-ness, mothers’ domesticity and nurturance of young children, fathers’central role as breadwinner, and young men embodying hope for thefuture.

Interest in pioneer mother monuments declined precipitouslyin the postwar era even though the appeal of the mythic West inpopular culture increased significantly in the 1950s. Film and tele-vision conflicts between ‘‘white hats’’ (good guys) and ‘‘black hats’’(bad guys) in the Wild West became a convenient way to grapplewith Cold War–era anxieties about the battle between good andevil.49 Importantly, Americans gravitated not only toward stories ofwhite cowboys dominating red Indians, but also tales of strong menand nurturing women settlers. Pioneer narratives increasinglybecame part of the nation’s foundation myths.50 In this new context,rural folk held on to their nostalgia for pioneering.

In ballooning western metropolises, bronze pioneer statuesbecame less popular. Undaunted, Fairbanks continued to visit smal-ler communities throughout the interior West, producing tributeslarge and small to white pioneer mothers, including at a publicdemonstration in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1954. Fairbanks was also eagerto sculpt a pioneer woman statue for Salem, Oregon, where janitorand elevator operator Caroll Moores had left nearly his entire lifesavings ‘‘in the hope of inspiring the people of the world to thegreatness of our pioneer heritage.’’51

When the officials responsible for Moores’s bequest at theaptly-named Pioneer Trust Company indicated their intention to

48. Avard Fairbanks to Russell Reid, 13 October 1947, Folder 4, Box 6, FairbanksPapers, Marriott Library.

49. B. Byron Price, ‘‘Cowboys and Presidents,’’ Convergence, Spring/Summer 2008,37–55; John Springhall, ‘‘Have Gun, Will Travel: The Myth of the Frontier in the Holly-wood Western,’’ The Historian 112 (Winter 2011): 20–24; Kushner, ‘‘The Persistence of the‘Frontier Thesis’ in America.’’

50. Anne M. Butler, ‘‘Selling the Popular Myth’’ in The Oxford History of the AmericanWest, eds. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York,1994): 771–801; Lee Clark Mitchell, ‘‘Whose West Is It Anyway? Or, What’s Myth Got toDo with It? The Role of ‘America’ in the Creation of the Myth of the West,’’ AmericanReview of Canadian Studies 33, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 497–508.

51. Avard T. Fairbanks to Barbara Cross, 22 May 1956, Folder 6, Box 4, FairbanksPapers, Marriott Library. See also: Mrs. Avard Fairbanks to George Putnam, 11 October1954, Folder 8, Box 1, Fairbanks Papers, Marriott Library.


use Moores’s money to purchase a nude Pierre-Auguste RenoirVenus Victorieuse statue as their monument to Oregon pioneers, thepeople of Salem were shocked. As Time magazine reported, ‘‘‘Whatwe want,’ said one member of the Lions, ‘is a statue of a pioneerwoman in a gingham dress and a sunbonnet . . . not this trash.’’’52

Although the popularity of such monuments had declined afterWorld War II, many of Salem’s 43,000 residents indeed seemed towant and expect yet another 1920s-style white pioneer mother mon-ument. Public protest apparently persuaded the Pioneer Trust offi-cials to reconsider their decision to purchase the valuable Renoircasting. The people of Salem presumably were relieved by the selec-tion committee’s eventual choice of the design submitted by Fair-banks, who had once taught art in nearby Eugene and was nowrenowned for his many pioneer monuments. The artist was overjoyedthat his traditional pioneer imagery prevailed:

Had [the plan] been completed Oregon would have had a French femalenude to represent the pioneer mothers of the great Oregon Trail. Whata travesty . . . Fortunately, we have real Westerners and true Americans whostill believe that our cultural heritage is well worth memorializing with trueand sincere presentations rather than by sophisticated misrepresentations.53

Tellingly, Fairbanks declared the iconic white pioneer woman torepresent not only Westerners whose ancestors had carried Anglocivilization westward, but also all ‘‘true Americans,’’ whose identityhad become inextricably linked to western mythology by the 1950s.

As Fairbanks worked on his proposal for the Salem statue, heexplained to an acquaintance in Oregon that in his monuments hesought ‘‘to keep alive in the memories of oncoming generations theheroic characters and their deeds which have built a great nation.’’54

Indeed, echoing work at the height of the Pioneer Mother Move-ment, Fairbanks adapted his 1924 Old Oregon Trail medallion yetagain for the Oregon Centennial bas relief, which he attached tothe reverse of this 1958 monument’s marble backdrop. Yet Fair-banks’s model for the Salem sculpture—which ultimately beat out

52. ‘‘Venus Observed,’’ Time, July 6, 1953, accessed Aug. 11, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,822851,00.html.

53. Fairbanks to Cross, 22 May 1956, Folder 6, Box 4, Fairbanks Papers, MarriottLibrary.

54. Avard Fairbanks to W. C. Calder, 29 January 1954, Folder 8, Box 1, FairbanksPapers, Marriott Library.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,822851,00.html


both the nude Renoir and several more conventional renditions ofthe pioneer theme—focused not on a popular pioneer mother char-acter, nor on a solo male pioneer, but on a child, as shown in Figure 7.Fairbanks explained that he chose to place a young man at the centerof the 1950s Salem monument because—in keeping with mainstreamfamily norms of that era—‘‘all life and our ideals are centered inyouth, for therein lies the great futures, not only in our times, butin all times and in all ages.’’55 The boy’s tender and loving mother(with no babe-in-arms requiring her intensive nurturance) stood justbehind him and to one side with her hand on the youth’s shoulder,while his strong father stood in the background, providing a firmfoundation while allowing the younger generation to lead. Thisfather’s occupation as a farmer would enable him to train and mentorhis young son, rather than abandoning him for long hours each dayat the office as many postwar middle-class fathers did.56 At the sametime, his guidance would protect his growing son from the danger ofexcessive emotional dependence on his nurturing mother.57 Yetunlike the father in the Depression-era Youth and New Frontiers, thismodern father stepped aside and encouraged his son to lead. In themidst of Cold War uncertainty, mainstream America’s energeticyouth, rather than its mothers’ civilizing influence or even its fathers’steadfastness, represented the nation’s greatest hope for the future.But the nineteenth-century frontier myth still underpinned Americannational identity.58

Western frontier mythology and the promise of America’syouth lost much of its cachet in the 1960s when the previous decade’s

55. Quoted in ‘‘Guidance of Youth,’’ Capital Journal, no date, Folder 11, Box 12,Fairbanks Papers, Marriott Library.

56. Weiss, To Have and to Hold.57. Psychological experts urged mothers to provide intensive nurturance to infants

but warned that continued emotional dependence was dangerous for older boys andadolescents. Plant, Mom, chapter 3.

58. Avard T. Fairbanks, Guidance of Youth, bronze, Salem, Oregon, 1958; ‘‘MooresSculptor: City Okay Condition for Pick,’’ Capital Journal, May 8, 1956, 1 and 5; ‘‘Guidanceof Youth,’’ Capital Journal, no date, Folder 22, Box 12, Fairbanks Papers, Marriott Library;‘‘Marble Group Proposed by Dr. Fairbanks,’’ Folder 22, Box 12, Fairbanks Papers, Mar-riott Library; Mrs. Avard Fairbanks to Putnam, 11 October 1954, Folder 8, Box 1, Fair-banks Papers, Marriott Library; ‘‘12-foot statue of pioneer family placed in south end ofBush’s Pasture Park in Salem, Oregon, 1959,’’ unknown photographer, Salem PublicLibrary photograph number SJ1029; ‘‘Venus Observed’’; ‘‘A Letter from the Publisher,’’Time, Oct. 12, 1953, accessed Aug. 11, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,860014,00.html.




Figure 7. Avard Fairbanks, Guidance of Youth, bronze, Salem, Oregon, 1958.Photograph by the author.


appearance of cultural conformity splintered amid student activism,calls for civil rights, and the sexual revolution. Significantly, no majorpioneer monuments were erected during the 1960s.

The American Family

In the 1970s, women’s liberation and various self-help move-ments inspired many Americans to rethink the proper role of menand women in marriage and family life. Fathers were encouraged tobe present at the birth of their offspring, and expectations for pater-nal nurturing of children grew.59 The LDS Church finally embracedfull church membership for African Americans, and some chal-lenged women’s exclusion from the priesthood, but the Churchorganized against the Equal Rights Amendment.60 Fairbanks re-sponded to these rapid social and religious changes by returningto a spiritual vision he had first expressed in a model sketch morethan three decades earlier. His moment of ‘‘profound spiritual sig-nificance’’ inspired a bronze family grouping installed in front of thecounty courthouse in Provo, Utah, in 1978.61 In many ways, thiswork, titled The American Family and shown in Figure 8, echoedearlier Fairbanks treatments of white western settlers. But thefather moved from the rear to the foreground, his young son athis knee. While the loving pioneer mother remained at the apex ofthe sculpture’s triangular shape, once again tenderly holding her

59. Kimmel, Manhood in America; Coontz, The Way We Never Were; Weiss, To Have andto Hold; Douglas, Where the Girls Are; Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents andthe Revolution at Home (New York: Avon Books, 1989).

60. Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Mauss, ‘‘Rethinking Retrenchment: CourseCorrections in the Ongoing Campaign for Respectability,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of MormonThought 44, no. 1 (2011): 1–42; Jan Shipps, ‘‘From Peoplehood to Church Membership:Mormonism’s Trajectory Since World War II,’’ Church History 76, no. 2 (June 2007): 241–61; Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of ModernMormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005); Frances Lee Menlove, ‘‘AForty-Year View: Dialogue and the Sober Lessons of History,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of MormonThought 39, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 88–97; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘‘Mormon Women in theHistory of Second-Wave Feminism,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 2(Summer 2010): 45–63; Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals & Podiums: Utah Women, Reli-gious Authority, and Equal Rights (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005); Jenny Harris,‘‘The Silent Majority: Conservative Perception, Mobilization, and Rhetoric at the UtahState International Women’s Year Conference’’ (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University,2005).

61. ‘‘The American Family,’’ The Daily Herald: Women Today, November 11, 1979, 41.


infant child, her presence seemed almost superfluous, as her hus-band’s dual roles as nurturer and patriarch took center stage.62

Figure 8. Avard Fairbanks, The American Family, bronze, Provo, Utah, 1978.Photograph by the author.

62. Avard T. Fairbanks, The American Family, bronze, Provo, Utah, 1978.


Rather than emphasizing the sacrifices of white pioneers, Fair-banks told a local newspaper that he created The American Family ‘‘tocommemorate the significance of the family in American history.’’63

Although the LDS Church had finally accepted African Americansinto full membership, Fairbanks still envisioned an Anglo Americanfamily ideal. He held out his own white LDS family as a model ofnational family values. Fairbanks’s decision to replace the monu-ment’s earlier working titles—first God Bless Our Home, and later TheEternal Family—with one emphasizing American familial ideals high-light its creator’s careful co-mingling of Mormon family values withnational family and western histories.64 The fact that the LDS DeseretNews and the Provo Herald persisted in referring to the sculpture asThe Eternal Family even as its unveiling neared, however, suggests thatMormon Utahans viewed it as a sacred statue despite its secularsetting.65 Even as the statue embraced changing national familynorms, it also spoke to its primarily LDS audience about their Mor-mon identity. They had become more American than the wider soci-ety at a time when many—Mormon and non-Mormon alike—believed that that society was straying from its core family values.They embraced Fairbanks’s appeal to a white American familynorm, at a time when long-standing Mormon cultural values sud-denly seemed to align with the nascent New Right’s emphasis on‘‘traditional (white) family values.’’66

Another major Fairbanks sculpture placed in the interior of thesame Utah County courthouse the following year reinforced the

63. ‘‘Garage Sale and Flea Market to Help Finance American Family Monument,’’Spanish Fork Press, date unknown, Folder 2, Box 13, Fairbanks Papers, Marriott Library.

64. Eugene F. Fairbanks, A Sculptor’s Testimony, 96–97. LDS teachings increasinglyemphasized the eternality of family life after the church abandoned polygamy in 1890.Kathryn M. Daynes, More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System,1840–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Eugene E. Campbell and Bruce L.Campbell, ‘‘Divorce among Mormon Polygamists: Extent and Explanations,’’ in The NewMormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City: Sig-nature Books, 1992): 181–200; Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism (New York:Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–5, 8.

65. ‘‘Eternal Family Monument Unveiled at Provo Ceremony,’’ Deseret News, weekendof Sept. 15, 1979, Folder 2, Box 13, Fairbanks Papers, Marriott Library.

66. On LDS assimilation, see Prescott, ‘‘All-American Eternal Family’’; Mauss, TheAngel and the Beehive; Mauss, ‘‘Rethinking Retrenchment’’; Shipps, ‘‘From Peoplehood toChurch Membership: Mormonism’s Trajectory since World War II,’’ Church History 76,no. 2 (June 2007): 241–61; Prince and Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of ModernMormonism.


sculptor’s desire to put white pioneer families at the center of nationalidentity. American Motherhood was erected by the American Family andMotherhood Statue Committee in 1979 (see Figure 9).67 While notexplicitly a pioneer monument, it featured a mother with babe inarms who bore a striking resemblance to the mothers featured in the

Figure 9. Avard Fairbanks, American Motherhood, marble, Provo, Utah, 1979.Photograph by the author.

67. Avard T. Fairbanks, American Motherhood, marble, Provo, Utah, 1979.


nearby The American Family and Fairbanks’s 1946 North DakotaPioneer Family Group. For the first time in fifty years, Fairbanks de-picted a pioneer mother and an attractive young daughter unaccom-panied by a family patriarch and strapping son.68 American Motherhoodis unique in Fairbanks’s use of white marble (rather than bronze) todepict the purity of Anglo American motherhood, and is one of twoFairbanks pioneer monuments to be installed indoors. While thecourthouse was hardly a mid-nineteenth-century mother’s rightfulsphere, the work’s placement indoors nonetheless suggests the wo-man’s domesticity even more effectively than the concrete backdropprotecting the Vancouver Pioneer Mother that Fairbanks created a half-century earlier. At a time when growing numbers of American womenwere embracing paid work outside the home, Fairbanks returned toan antebellum maternal ideal, presenting the (white, middle-class)American mother as a symbol of the nation’s virtue and commitmentto traditional values.69 This image clearly spoke to Americans con-cerned about changing family roles, as models of American Motherhoodwere presented to the Utah County, state, and national Mother of theYear recipients by the inter-faith American Mothers, Inc.70 The whitepaternal and maternal images that Fairbanks created in his 1920s and1930s pioneer monuments had, by the late 1970s, come to representnot only Mormon or western families, but the American family.

Fairbanks’s pioneer families

At first glance, Fairbanks’s many pioneer-themed statues andbas reliefs appear remarkably similar. In the early twentieth century,at a time of rapid social change and nostalgia for so-called traditionalrural life, Fairbanks and others built massive bronze monuments ide-alizing white settler women. However, Fairbanks’s embrace of moralmotherhood—and his own LDS religious beliefs—inspired him todepict western women in ways more typical of mid-nineteenth-century domestic ideology. By introducing men into his monuments,

68. In keeping with what Plant called the ‘‘transformation of motherhood’’ in thepostwar era, by 1979 a mother tending to a growing boy would have been perceived asa threat to his budding masculinity. Thus, in the absence of a strong father figure, Fair-banks replaced the sons he had favored for decades with a well-groomed little girl. Plant,Mom.

69. Ibid.70. Fairbanks, American Motherhood, 1979; ‘‘American Mothers: About Us,’’ accessed

March 17, 2011, www.americanmothers.org.


and then by rearranging the characters within each sculpture, Fair-banks changed his depictions of stock pioneer characters to fit thetimes. His post–World War II statues simultaneously reflected andhelped to reinforce new beliefs in the centrality of the white nuclearfamily. For fifty years after creating Vancouver’s domestic PioneerMother, Fairbanks remained wedded to Madonna imagery. But hisimages of a pioneer patriarch and a Prairie Madonna eventuallybecame far more than nostalgic celebrations of local settlers. Indeed,for Fairbanks, his donors, and social conservatives, they had becomethe ideal American family—and an embodiment of the Americannation.

Interest in pioneer monuments grew once again just as Fair-banks’s long sculpting career ended with his death in 1987. Re-newed anxiety about immigration and changing gender andsexual norms inspired renewed interest in pioneer commemoration.Several smaller communities in the interior West erected centennialmonuments in the late 1980s that resembled Fairbanks’s pioneerfamilies. But the conservative movement that generated interest inFairbanks’s monuments in the 1970s and in similar monumentsafter his death helped spark a culture war in the 1990s—one thatplayed out dramatically, for instance, in Portland, Oregon. Ninetyyears after suffragists erected a statue of Sacagawea as the first trib-ute to ‘‘the Pioneer Mother of Oregon,’’ the installation of a Fair-banks-like bronze trio of pioneer father, mother, and son withinwalking distance of the Cooper Sacajawea (and less than ten milesfrom Fairbanks’s Vancouver Pioneer Mother) sparked controversy.While conservatives embraced the erection of David Manuel’s ThePromised Land, an outspoken minority of more progressive Portlan-ders challenged the statue as being exclusionary both racially andreligiously. Critics were particularly concerned by the statue’s seem-ing celebration of the destruction of indigenous peoples. Yet at thesame time, smaller communities in the interior West enthusiasticallyerected their own monuments to pioneer families that look a greatdeal like Fairbanks’s postwar pioneer families.71

Throughout the twentieth century, western American com-munities erected monuments to commemorate their early settlers.

71. Prescott, ‘‘Pioneer Mothers for the New Millennium,’’ in Excavating Memory:Material Culture Approaches to Sites of Remembering and Forgetting, ed. Maria Theresia Starz-mann and John R. Roby (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).


Tracing changing depictions of men, women, and children in pio-neer statues over the course of Fairbanks’s remarkably long careerhighlights changing western gender norms and American familyideals. In Fairbanks’s hands, tributes to the triumph of white civili-zation gradually yielded to celebrations of (white, middle-class)nuclear family life. Remembering the primacy of rural women’smaternal role gave way to celebrations of fatherly guidance and love.Family togetherness trumped separate gender spheres, and familiesincreasingly focused on children as the new center of the family. YetFairbanks’s final pioneer-themed works—and similar works createdafter his death—also promised a return to mid-nineteenth-centurydomesticity as American nuclear families splintered at the close ofthe Cold War. While both the artist and these sculptures’ donorssought to commemorate a nineteenth-century ‘‘golden age’’ of theAmerican family, their monuments more effectively enshrined rap-idly changing popular conceptions of ideal family life in the twenti-eth century. At the same time, these monuments served to reframethe myths of the frontier. In the monumental works of sculptorAvard T. Fairbanks, western history became American history, andthe mythical frontier family came to embody the American nation.


Representing the Ideal American Family ... - Pioneer Monuments · Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race,...

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